Researcher Desktop Information and Guides

Owned by Mengsi Wells-Lakeland
Last updated: Nov 01, 2024
4 min read

The Researcher Desktop is a Personal Computer on the cloud that you can use as an extra compute resource for your research. You may find this useful to free up your laptop/workstation or to have a computer running overnight to do processing. The Researcher Desktop runs on the Cloud and uses the same University of Melbourne Linux (Ubuntu) or Windows 10 desktop environment that you would be familiar with. This is a faster way of getting an additional computer than buying and setting one up yourself. The Researcher Desktop resource is specific to you, and is not a resource that can be shared in an Activity. You may use this for the duration of your research.

Mini tutorials

 

Click on the create button for your preferred Operating System. This will start a timer while your Researcher Desktop is being prepared. The button will turn green when your Research Desktop is ready. You can delete a Researcher Desktop by opening its options page (using the options icon to the right of the open button). You must confirm that you are sure you want to delete the Researcher Desktop. Once deleted, it cannot be recovered.

To connect to your Windows Researcher Desktop, click the "Open" button. This will download a small file with the connection information for your Windows Researcher Desktop. Double-click the downloaded file to open your Remote Desktop Client on your local computer. You will be connected to your Windows Researcher Desktop. If this is your first time logging in, it will take a few minutes to set up your profile. When it is ready, you will be prompted for your University username and password. Once logged in, you can begin using the pre-installed applications. To access new applications, the Software Center needs to be populated with the University's site license applications. This can take up to a few hours to complete.

To connect to your Linux Researcher Desktop, click the "Open" button. Enter your University username and password when prompted. Click the blue plus button in the top left to create a new desktop session. Choose "Unity" and click Launch. If you see a pop up blocker message, just click "Connect" to go to your Researcher Desktop.

You can shelve a Researcher Desktop by opening the options page (using the options icon to the right of the open button). Shelving allows you to maintain the current state of the Researcher Desktop while releasing the associated computing resources for others to use. You can unshelve the Researcher Desktop when you need it again. Read more about shelving and unshelving here.

You can boost a Researcher Desktop by opening the options page (using the options icon to the right of the open button). Your Researcher Desktop will remain in the boosted state for 7 days. It will then downsize. At any time during those 7 days, you can request an additional 7 days by clicking the "Extend" button. The date and time of the scheduled downsize is displayed above the "Open" button on the Home page. Note: boosting and downsizing require the Researcher Desktop to reboot and any running processes or file transfers will be terminated.

FAQs

 

Reference guides